 Who is this man? This "Joe Bob Briggs"? The early life of Joe Bob Briggs is shrouded in mystery and legend, much of it of his own invention. What's known is that he comes from some obscure rural county in West Texas. When he was 19 years old, he was hired by Entertainment Editor Ron Smith at the long defunct Dallas Times Herald. As best can be determined, the column called Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In which appeared on January 15, 1982, is the first time he ever set pen to paper except for three trifling efforts that resulted in felony forgery charges, later dismissed. His first review--an appreciation of the Italian cannibal programmer THE GRIM REAPER--resulted in such a frenzy of popular support (two people called the paper, or one more than had ever been the case in the staid institution's first 100 years of existence) that it became a regular weekly feature, interrupted only by those periods during which Briggs, poorly aided by his famous attorney Bobo Rodriguez, languished in the Bossier City, Louisiana, jail at the end of a long weekend of crossing interstate lines for immoral purposes. Nevertheless, Joe Bob's reputation grew like a West Texas stinkweed as he philosophized about life and occasionally got around to reviewing the movie while celebrating American pop culture. Joe Bob was eventually syndicated in more than a hundred newspapers and received fan letters often reaching into the double digits each week.
Joe Bob returned to Dallas to find 2000 letters of support on just the first day after the protest meeting. The story dominated Dallas news coverage for the rest of the week and was picked up by national wire services, and a political-correctness censorship debate ensued. Within three days, Joe Bob had picked up a new syndicator--Universal Press--and was back in business. Within three months he was preparing his first standup comedy show.
In 1986, as a result of the stage show, Joe Bob was asked to be a guest host on Drive-In Theater, a late- night B-movie show on The Movie Channel, sister network of Showtime. Joe Bob went over so well that he was eventually signed to a long-term contract. Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater became the network's highest-rated show and ran for almost ten years, and was twice nominated for the industry's Cable ACE Award. He appeared on some 50 talk shows, including "The Tonight Show" twice and "The Larry King Show." He was also a commentator for a Fox TV news magazine for two seasons. Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater ended when the network changed format in early 1996. He was off the air for only four months before joining the TNT network, where he hosted MonsterVision for four years. That show ended in July 2000, when once again the network changed format. In the late nineties he spent two seasons as a commentator on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, beginning with the premiere episode. During these TV years, Briggs remained active as a writer, working as a contributing editor to The National Lampoon, freelancing for Rolling Stone, Playboy, The Village Voice and Andy Warhol's Interview. He was the regular humor columnist and theater critic at The National Review, and he published five books of satire--Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In, A Guide to Western Civilization, or, My Story, Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive-In, The Cosmic Wisdom of Joe Bob Briggs, and Iron Joe Bob, his parody of the men's movement. He also wrote and performed in special shows for the Fox network and Showtime, and collaborated with veteran comedy writer Norman Steinberg on an NBC sitcom that remains unproduced. His two syndicated newspaper columns--Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In and Joe Bob's America-- were picked up by The New York Times Syndicate in the nineties, and he continued to write both until putting the columns on hiatus in 1998. For one year he wrote a humorous sex advice column in Penthouse. In November 2000 he started writing the Drive-In column again, this time for United Press International, along with a second column, The Vegas Guy, which chronicles Joe Bob's weekly forays into the casinos of America. In 2003, Joe Bob delivered Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History Beginning in 1990 Joe Bob snagged a series of acting roles in movies (CASINO, FACE/OFF, THE STAND and most recently, THE STORYTELLERS) and TV shows (Married . . . with Children). Since the cancellation of MonsterVision, he has worked primarily as a writer for UPI, Talk magazine, and Maximum Golf, specializing in humor, gambling and pop culture. Joe Bob has also provided commentary tracks for Elite Entertainment's I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (Millennium Edition), JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER and DOUBLE D AVENGER as well as nine titles for Media Blasters. Joe Bob's latest book, Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies That Changed History was released fall of 2005. |
In
April of 1985, in his regular Friday column, Joe Bob
wrote a parody of "We Are the World" called "We Are the
Weird." A Dallas County Commissioner named John Wiley Price took offense at the column, claiming it made fun of starving African children,
and agitated against the newspaper for three days on a local radio station. On the following
Monday, Joe Bob was in College Station, delivering the "National Library Week" address at Texas
A&M University, when several
hundred followers of Price demanded
a meeting with the Times Herald editor and insisted that the column be cancelled and
Briggs be
fired. With TV cameras rolling, the perspiring editor shouted "All
right--as of this moment, Joe
Bob is dead!" The crowd cheered--but Joe Bob was far from
dead.
An Evening with Joe Bob
Briggs, Joe Bob's one-man show,
debuted in Cleveland in July 1985. Later re-titled Joe Bob Dead
in Concert, it evolved into a theatrical piece involving story-
telling, comedy and music that was performed in more than 50
venues over the next two years, including Caroline's in New York,
convention centers, theaters, music clubs, comedy clubs, and
regular engagements at Wolfgang's and the Great American Music
Hall in San Francisco.